Are the dead afflicted by mental robots?

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

All right, Papa, I told Nancy I had been feeling rather distant from you, and she wondered – and now I wonder – do you have robots operative on your side, and, if you do, can you do anything about them with or without help from this side. Needless I hope to say, I’d be very willing.

I’m not the one to ask about these theoretical questions. I certainly didn’t do all that well in physical life in combating robots!

I could ask Dr. Jung, I suppose. Robots on the other side?

The question is difficult because badly phrased. Assumptions within one’s logic and premises may result in valid information being received in such a way as to become invalid. Chief among these obstacles is the scarcely noticed effect of living moment-by-moment, as opposed to living in the totality of yourself. I recognize that this is not yet clear. I will attempt to clarify, given your patience.

When you live in the body, you live moment by moment, of necessity. Now, this is not the same as the statement “living in the moment,” which implies full or fuller awareness rather than a state of semi-automatism caused by too many automatic associations shielding you from the impact of whatever is going on at the moment. In such cases, you are still living moment-to-moment in terms of your physical environment but are relatively less aware of your actual inward reaction to external stimuli because the internal “noise” of automatically triggered reactions divides your attention.

I refer instead to the simple fact of life that you live in each successive moment of time, regardless how conscious you may or may not be in each of those moments. A person in a trance, or a psychotic state, or active awareness, or a dream, or a daydream, or a semi-conscious fantasy, or excited self-forgetting calculation – all persons, in all states, live each moment because the three-dimensional world offers no choice.

So. When you live moment by moment, different combinations within you are activated by different external circumstances. This is how the world is designed to operate, for good reason. How else are you to be tumbled and polished, rather than remain in your initial state?

Interesting analogy.

Perhaps if you were to query the rocks in the tumbler, they would object to the process! They might find it cruel, or pointless, or chaotic and random, and they might experience the jostling abrasion as a process of irretrievable loss. And this is true enough from the point of view of the untumbled rock. That rock would perhaps find it incomprehensible that in its later polished state it would not only retroactively assent to the process but would understand and approve of it.

That tumbler does not function on this side. The rock that is the unique combination of elements that formed a soul received such tumbling as it was going to get while still in the body. After that process completes, it lives under different conditions.

And a second difficulty in discussing afterlife conditions is that confusion of soul and spirit that is so difficult to clear up.

A soul is created of various elements (compounded, one might say) in specific circumstances, thus forever taking the characteristics of its time and space. Goethe will forever be Goethe, shaped by and rooted in the Germany of his time. Useless and confusing to think of Goethe reincarnating into another time and place. What reincarnates is not soul, but spirit. What was Goethe shaped from, after all? A body, to be sure, comprising the physical heredity of his parents. But something else, too, yes? The animation of the soul comes from (or, one should more properly say, is) the spirit.

It is the spirit that accumulates souls as beads on a string.

So now, when you in the body contact us out of bodies, who do you connect to? A shapeless spirit or a personality soul? The answer is, either, depending upon desire and circumstances, and, in a way both. And it is this latter that can be difficult to convey.

You speak, perhaps, to the soul that lived as Ernest Hemingway. Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether you (or anyone) speaks to the entire person or only to those aspects to which you have a point of contact, still, you come into contact. Can you be said to contact the soul without the spirit that animated and that continues to animate it? There is a difference between talking to a person and talking to a photograph of a person! Nothing lives without the spirit living within it.

However, that spirit is not confined within that soul, nor within any and all souls! The spirit is always free, always unconfined, always, let us say, greater than, and behind, any individual personality. This is only common sense, once you realize that spirit precedes and succeeds any given incarnation.

So, if you contact Ernest Hemingway, you contact a specific aspect of the underlying spirit. That phrase “specific aspect of the underlying spirit” is a good definition of the word soul.

In the disembodied state, which might better be termed the unencumbered-by-body state, one is free from the moment-to-moment pressure of that externally pressing changing present moment, and so one’s awareness is freed to move to more remote rooms, first of that soul, then perhaps, depending upon one’s interest and makeup, of (shall we call them) associated souls – other beads on a string of that spirit.

It is in this sense that a spirit may be said to have a progression of lives, accumulating experiences. Souls don’t reincarnating any more than Tuesdays do. But souls may be accessed via a given soul, through the animating spirit, in the same way that the record of Tuesdays may be marked on a calendar. This is somewhat a static analogy, but perhaps a helpful one.

Yes, it is.

Well then, to return to the starting point, can you see that the question of a freed-from-body soul having robots to contend with isn’t the question it appeared? Neither spirit or soul has need of correction, per se. In the absence of momentary pressures to call forth explosions of temper, say, or paroxysms of paranoia or insecurity or any of the uncomfortable emotions, the moment-by-moment functioning of the soul (to the extent that “moment to moment” applies!) is far more the average of what it became than it is the exceptional lopsided expression it may have been at any given present moment during Earth life.

Does this mean, then, that the soul once departed from Earth is finished and cannot be helped or hindered from Earth?

Not precisely. That would be a logical deduction, but not necessarily a valid one. Pressure from the earth may be used for change, but the nature of the change is not easily conveyed. It is in its way an equivalent to the pressure of the present moment that was felt in the body. That is, it will impel (but not compel) a soul to express this rather than that aspect of itself, and this change over time may affect the expression of the underlying spirit in future creation of souls.

That’s really vague in my mind.

Well, I did say it isn’t easily conveyed. You’ll find it more precisely conveyed – though in an alien thought-framework – in the Catholic dogma concerning praying for the souls of the dead. Implied, you see, is that human present-day intervention may affect souls not in the body. However because it is couched in terms of forgiveness of sins, the potentially illuminating concept is clouded. Still, it could function as a clue. That is to say, it could bring your mind to a place where it would be easier for it to intuit truths that otherwise would be too far away for it to grasp.

That’s an interesting side-trail in itself, isn’t it? How thinking in one direction can help us think farther in that direction.

That may be how it looks to you. I should say, rather, that exposing your mind to one set of inputs not customary to its functioning may activate certain latent sympathies (resonances, you would say, I think) that can then extend to branches of the universal mind that were closed to it before that.

Well, thank you very much for all this. So – nothing I can do/need to do for Ernest?

Nothing you can do in your present state of understanding. Where you are, you could engage in prayer for the dead – that is, prayer, intent, desire, that all be well for him.

Then I will do that, and for you no less.

He and I thank you for that, and you will find that, as in any action done with benevolent intent, the action will be its own reward.